Packaging Licenced Applications Through App Volumes

Question

I'm having problems with App Volumes and I  cant find any online recourses to help, so reaching out to the community.
In Thinapp you would set your provisioning desktop into capture mode, install your application, open it up, put a product key in, mess about with pop ups saying "don't show again" etc etc then hit build. and all is well. (most of the time)
How do you do that in App Volumes? After I install the application in capture mode I open the newly installed application up, put the licence code in, place a shortcut on the desktop then Click OK to complete, reboot the provisioning desktop and click Complete on the App stack then assign it to a different desktop to test on. The application itself has been packaged fine and appears but it doesn't recognise I put in a licence code when I opened it up earlier nor put a shortcut on the desktop. It seems that anything I do outside the initial install (when still in capture mode) doesn't get captured and carried on to the desktops.
Any help would be appreciated, thanks in advance.
Barry

Answer 1

It depends on what you thin is easy. We did indeed do this with APPV and it worked great. Only problem with applications like APPV (i don't know ThinApp that well to be hnoest) is that all information was stored in a read write file that you could not access and only remove as a hole thus removing all settings.
For as far as i'm aware they make use of different settings to do this. As said you could be using Microsoft Policies for copying files into APPDATA (works like a charm with item level targeting) or use the startup.bat file in the appstack. You can set all sorst of commands into this file that needs to be executed when being attached to the machine.
You could also be using anything from a writable volume up to persona management and roaming profile to save these settings for users so they only need to do this once.
Also, if you need to have a shortcut on the desktop for all users either install the application withe the ALLUSERS=1 attribute or create the shortcut in the C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu (for all users start menu) or the C:\Users\Public\Public Desktop (all users desktop) so every user that logs in gets the application.
I do understand that, with using a tool like ThinApp it seems like it is an easy solution but to be honest i like the way that Appvolumes does it much better. I am able to set up personal settings for a user by using policies or the bat file but the settings i create in this case are easily changable (because in the Appdata of the user) and customizable per user. If you add this into the ThinApp applications your not that flexible.